Dossier September 2019

There has never been a Kurdish State. But, there has been and still exists a Kurdish nation. The Kurds have occupied the mountains that extend from western Iran to eastern Turkey through Iraq and Syria for centuries. because political boundaries have worked that way, and there is no Kurdish nation, as such, although they have…

There has been a tendency on the side of the mainstream media to describe this movement as a monolithic entity, and interested in adopting the model of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In fact, the Shi’a movement in Iraq is more complex, having responded almost exclusively to specific indigenous socio-economic Iraqi mechanisms. While, one of…

As the Ba’ath increasingly dominated the State, the Communists faced greater restrictions on their activities. By the early 1980’s they had been virtually silenced. Indeed, the Ba’ath Party suppressed all secular opposition. The effect was that all political grievances were increasingly channelled through the Shiite Islamic movement. The Shi’a were poor, but well represented politically…

Iraq, the country established on the land of the Assyrians and Babylonians of ancient Mesopotamia, is one of the most bitter fruits of the Franco-British imperialist nation-building efforts in the post-WW1 scenario that was the ‘Sykes-Picot’ Accord, signed on May 16, 1916. British, French and, to a lesser extent, Russian diplomats decided how the former…